An Unimpeachable Source

The economy will pick back up in the second half — honest:

“We can put our finger on the problems, and they’re temporary, I think,” said Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. “Oil prices were a blow. You can see that in the consumer spending numbers in Q1, and prices are coming back down.”

Here’s a nice bit from Zandi’s Wikipedia bio:

Zandi’s analysis of the impact of an economic stimulus package on the United States economy was cited by Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein in their report on President Barack Obama’s proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.[4] Zandi uses old-style Keynesian models in the spirit of Nobel Prize winner Lawrence Klein. The utility of such models to gauge the impact of fiscal stimulus has been questioned by Harvard economist Robert J. Barro.

Sigh.